Bergamo-Style Cabbage and Chickpea Soup

Marcella Hazan's Zuppa di Verza alla Bergamasca con i Ceci

Marcella Hazan’s Bergamo-Style Cabbage and Chickpea Soup

There is more than one cabbage soup in Marcella Hazan’s repertoire, and though many will know the Romagna-style version from “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”, with its tender rice and stewed cabbage, this one takes a different road entirely.

This is the Bergamo-style cabbage soup from “Marcella Cucina”⁵ a slower, richer, deeper soup, with the quiet muskiness of chickpeas and the aromatic lift of pancetta and celery. A soup built on patience, the kind of dish that teaches you to trust time and simple ingredients.

When I made this recently, I began in the evening, but life as it does, had other plans. After an hour of simmering the chickpeas with the cabbage, I ran out of time to finish the long cooking Marcella calls for. So I turned off the heat and left the soup to rest, cooling gently before refrigerating overnight. The next morning, I brought it back to life on the lowest possible flame, letting it burble away softly for a few more hours as the day unfolded.

The result was superb. The cabbage, long-cooked and caramelised, gave the soup a gentle sweetness. The chickpeas softened further into creamy little pearls. The broth deepened into something almost glossy, rich without heaviness.

It felt right to serve it in small bowls as the soup course for my Easter Luncheon, a generous spoonful of parmesan stirred through at the last moment, just as Marcella advises. Enough to warm and nourish, without overwhelming the meal that followed.

This is not a flashy soup. But it is a generous, thoughtful, and grounded one. The kind of food that makes sense at a table where friends are talking softly and passing plates hand to hand. A dish that asks nothing of you but a little time, and repays you with depth.

Ingredients for Marcella Hazan’s Bergamo Style Cabbage & Chickpea soup

The Other Cabbage Soup: A Taste of Bergamo

Tucked away in the pages of “Marcella Cucina”⁵ is this lesser known cabbage soup. This one from Bergamo, in Lombardy, a northern Italian town nestled at the foothills of the Alps.

It is a soup that begins similarly as the Romagna-style soup with cabbage and ends with Parmesan, but the path between those points is entirely different. Here, pancetta provides a smoky backbone. Celery and carrot bring their soft sweetness, and instead of rice, the richness comes from chickpeas, which lend not only their gentle starch but also what Marcella describes as a faint muskiness, that earthy, almost honeyed depth that chickpeas carry when cooked well.

Marcella offers the choice of dried or canned chickpeas, noting with her usual honesty that canned are often excellent and far more reliable than some dried varieties. She also speaks to the small, thoughtful act of peeling chickpeas by hand squeezing away their thin skins to leave behind smooth, creamy pearls. It is not strictly necessary, but it is one of those gestures that carries a kind of quiet grace.

This is not fast cooking. It is the kind of soup that asks you to slow down, not with hard work, but with time. Hours at a gentle simmer transform the cabbage into something caramelised and sweet, and the chickpeas soften into the broth until everything feels deeply woven together.

It is also a soup that rewards making ahead. Marcella herself tells us that it is excellent prepared the day before. And in my own kitchen, I discovered this to be true, when the pace of life meant the soup had to wait overnight to finish, the flavours seemed all the better for it.

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